


See Me In Hindsight

by thelilacfield



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Zombies, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Heavy Angst, Hydra (Marvel), M/M, Minor Character Death, Recovery, Tragic Romance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-12-14
Updated: 2014-12-14
Packaged: 2018-03-01 12:08:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,224
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2772452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thelilacfield/pseuds/thelilacfield
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>'Someday when you leave me I bet these memories Follow you around' - 23rd March 2000. The day Steve Rogers crashed his plane into the depths of the Arctic Ocean and was lost. Twelve years pass, and SHIELD helps the world survive the Rising, losing men but gaining prestige. Two scientists studying in the Arctic never expected Iron Man to confront them after they called in a PDS sufferer wandering in the icy wastes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	See Me In Hindsight

**This fic was inspired by[this fantastic piece of artwork](http://maria-tries.tumblr.com/post/96203774740/just-a-quick-sketch-of-the-in-the-flesh-au-made) by [maria-tries](http://maria-tries.tumblr.com/). In short, it is an  _In The Flesh_ AU, though I will attempt to make it stand alone for those who have never seen the TV show. The timeline is also different to MCU canon - in short WWII happened, but HYDRA kept growing without infiltrating the non-existent SHIELD. The war between HYDRA and the world began again, and Steve was made into the super-soldier. Also notably different is ages - everyone is their canon age fifty-five years in the future except Howard, who is twenty years older than Peggy. Tony was born in 1987. [Rating liable to change with future chapters].**

**Lyrics in the summary and title taken from _Wildest Dreams_ by Taylor Swift**

* * *

The radio crackles softly, like a record with the needle knocked astray. Each vague sound is a swoop of hope like an eagle in the pit of their stomachs, fingers tightening on a shoulder, frantic heartbeats and eyes bright with vague hope. And then shoulders sink and lips quiver and mouths droop at the corners when the radio only sparks a few pops and buzzing static, on and on like music that swirls through a summer's night. Like the crackle of fireworks shimmering down an indigo-black sky, the fireworks that filled his eyes and gave him strength, the fireworks that rose for him every year. For the nation's symbol.

"Steve?" Peggy's voice breaks the silence that looms long, like a shadow beneath a streetlight, and sounds on the air like a broken heartbeat, juddering and irregular. Only the static replies to her, and she turns away, finger sliding off the button with a soft sound of sweat-slick skin against plastic. Heads are bowed, and people begin to leave, shuffling feet and rustling clothes and soft murmurs of condolence.

The statement goes out later that day, televisions flickering to life with that sad official, clothed all in black, face veiled by loss, telling the country, "Steve Rogers, better known as Captain America, is dead." The statement is short, jarring, and the picture drains into a blackness, silence that stretches thin like thread, all of them looking at each other. There's no knowing what to do. No orders to follow now.

Howard pins on a stiff upper lip, eyes rimmed with red from quiet, secret crying, and sweeps them all out into the star-spangled night that makes them think of the star-spangled man. The pub opens its door for them, the patrons silent, their eyes hollow with a grief shared by the nation. But they don't know. They didn't know Steve personally, only Captain America. To them, the pain they each feel is unimaginable, of a magnitude beyond the deepest ocean or the widest desert or the highest mountain. It's liquid that curls dark gold into their glasses, white-knuckled fingers curled around the glasses, leaving messy fingerprints on the gleaming perfection.

Contrary to their name, the Howling Commandos are eerily silent, draining their glasses and refilling, the motion of their throats the only outward sign that they're alive at all. Howard is tapping his nails against the bar in a dull rhythm that sounds oddly like that awful tune they wrote for Steve in those early days before he forced his way into the field. Peggy stares into her glass, the way her jagged breathing makes the golden surface ripple, spreading ridges in the smooth mirror surface like the shockwaves of Steve's death, and she wraps her fingers tighter, raising it in a ritual she's seen these men repeat before. "To absent friends," she says softly, and they all look at her, eyes shadowed by sadness, the depths dark with loss.

Morita speaks first, raising his glass. "To Bucky," he says, and the words are familiar, sunk into all their veins, the lines etched in their faces by this war and all that comes along with it. "It was an honour and a pleasure to fight with him." Eyes meet and they all nod along, taking a drink, and Peggy notices others do the same, simple patrons of the bar who didn't know Steven Rogers or James Buchanan Barnes, simply Captain America and his right hand man.

One stands, a man with a shock of grey in his ear and an aging stoop to his shoulders, finger criss-crossed with scars, and he raises his glass. "To Captain America," he says, voice carrying like a roll of thunder through the silence, and the bar is quiet for only a moment. Voices join the chorus, fifty, a hundred, all the patrons on their feet and chanting the name of the man now frozen beneath the ice, trapped forever.

Howard's hand shakes when he raises his glass, but his voice is steady as he says, "To Steve Rogers. A better man than any of us are, or can ever hope to be." He looks up to the ceiling, past it, to the heavens where Steve now resides, and says, "To my captain."

It's such a simple thing to say, but the bar says it along with this small knot of people whose lives were irrevocably changed by Steve Rogers, and Peggy's eyes are prickling with tears. Howard puts an arm around her gently, and, for a few minutes, they are a collection of people, just one of many mourning beneath the great black sky.

But there's paperwork to be filed. The Howling Commandos return to base drunk and staggering, reeling along familiar paths, eyes vacant and smiles fake, forced by the alcohol that stains their blood. Composed, clean, Peggy takes her seat at a desk, and begins to carefully fill in the paperwork. There's no next of kin to send a condolence letter to - it was Bucky, the one Steve had on every scrap of paper, the man saturated into every seam of his life. Black ink blurs across the page, and she had no idea of the words she is writing. Grief fills her, dark and cloying like a thundercloud, and she stays awake until pale dawn stains the horizon, cheeks scarred silver with tears and heart tapping out the rhythm of a dance that will never be taken.

Alone in the night, encouraged by whisky and the smoke of cigarettes that clings to him, Howard opens the door to Steve's small room. Museums are already offering high prices for items that were important to the great Captain America, and the collection of items is so small, yet so inspirational. He's sure it's what Steve would've wanted - to continue inspiring people, beyond his lifetime. To put some trace of good back into America. Breathing harshly through his nose to hold back the tidal wave of grief springing up in his gut, Howard opens drawers and uncovers boxes, inspecting each item. The timeless uniform went down with Steve, but his personal effects are still hidden away here. A lifetime of broken hearts, fond memories, regrets and wishes and dreams for a future that will never come, cruelly taken away by a plane that dived into the ice.

He finds a sketchbook, buried in a box, and sits down on the neatly-made bed to look through it, searching for more information about the man he barely knew. The drawings are stunning, capturing the subject in the best light, letting personality shine out. Bucky is the subject of so many, strong jaw and wicked smile and the gleam in his eye, always a little knowing. Always looking towards the artist, every stroke of the pencil infused with something unnameable, unknowable. Something beautiful, that lifts the drawing right off the page.

There are letters too. But he only glances over them to know they must never fall into the hands of a museum - these are not for public eyes. These are secrets, held in words that have since faded, paper with torn, curled edges, words that jolt him in terrifying ways. Instead, he turns to the bed, and begins to strip the sheets, detaching himself. He floats away, trying not to think that he's peeling Steve's ghost from the mattress, and only hits reality with a bump when he hears a rustle of paper.

It falls from beneath the pillow, and he snatches it up as it swings on the air to the floor, eyes wide as he stares at the paper. The writing is jagged, odd when he's used to Steve's neat, round hand, simple to read and understand, easy. And it only says one word, over and over again, looping and conjoining and bleeding into each other, dozens of different sizes, the points of the letters sharp like a knife. It almost feels too personal for him to look at, like a body bled out onto the paper, a desire spilled out in soft grey, thoughts made tangible and etched into this forever. It's like Steve's eulogy, penned by his own hand, and in that split-second, Howard realises the reason for the plane crash. He could've turned around. Could've punched a hole in the plane and leapt from it. Could've swum for the shore. Could've never died at all.

He chose death. Instead of a life bereft of the one thing that truly mattered to Steve Rogers, beyond goodness, beyond freedom, beyond the right thing, beyond even his adoration of Peggy or his respect for the Howling Commandos.

_Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky._

Howard Stark stands alone in the empty room that once belonged to Steve Rogers, now haunted by ghosts in the walls, barely able to breathe. He collapses onto the bed, chest rising and falling with erratic breaths, heart beating out a ticking metronome. The harshness of it all makes him want to lie back and close his eyes, to drink until he forgets everything. It feels like falling, whipped by the wind, and he understands how Bucky Barnes must've felt in his last moments, unable to hold onto anything. Looking up at the man he was leaving behind to face the evil in the world alone. The man who...who... _God_.

The world can never know. America can't know. If the people find out, if the nation knows, it'll become something bandied about the smoke-thick bars, people laughing, making comments under their breath. Hollywood will cling to it, to this tragic story. It'll become a farce, a joke, a fad, and he can't let that happen. This - the letters filled with tenderness, even in the strokes of a pen that create the words; the portraits drawn so delicately, no mistake marring the handsome face; the piece of paper, Steve's final words, the obsessive jagged letters, the blots of ink on the paper flooded by helpless tears - can never fall into the hands of the museums or the media.

It's too pure, too precious, to be marred by the world, the black evils that ruin sunshine and goodness and the compassion in a person. Howard folds the letters back up, arranging them neatly in the box. He flicks through the sketchbooks, chooses a few sketches of scenery, pretty skies and soaring trees, and tucks the few objects he wants to release to museums into a box. Calls to let them know he'll meet them in a safe place and give the items over.

He never breathes a word to a single soul. Not one mention of what he found, of what he discovered in those seemingly innocent boxes. But he's sure everyone around him, everyone who knew the Steve behind the costume, knows - everyone saw Steve's reaction to the fall. The way he sat in the bar that was crumbling around him, drinking glass after glass even though the alcohol had no effect, staring blankly at the wall. It was like he'd built a wall around himself - and the only person who could force their way through was gone, snapped up by the jaws of winter.

Steve Rogers was helplessly, hopelessly, utterly in love with Bucky Barnes.

Steve Rogers let his plane dive into the ocean and died in the claws of the ice because he watched the great love of his life fall to his death in the mountains.

Two men were taken by winter. The world will never know just how significant it was. But these people will. They walk like ghosts in the camp, eyes hollow and faces washed out, grey with sleepless nights and sustained grief.

Lose one, lose the other. Because there was a promise they made, a promise Howard found in the letters, and he has carved into the gravestones that nudge shoulders, empty graves with no bodies to fill them. Bodies lost in the ice and snow, the howling winds that whip against mountains and oceans. The throttling evil of nature.

 _With you - until the end of the line_.

* * *

_**PRESIDENT: 'IT'S A NEW AGE OF PROTECTION AND FREEDOM FOR OUR COUNTRY'** _

_**STARK AND CARTER: PIONEERS OF PROTECTION** _

_**WHO IS NICK FURY?** _

These are the headlines that decorate the blank slate of the newsstand, called out by the voices made hoarse with flu season, as Peggy walks down the street, heels clicking on the slick pavements, coat drawn tightly around her thinner form - weight lost to grief and sadness and working too hard and too long - and face hidden beneath the umbrella keeping the slanting snow away from her. Cold grips the city like a fist, and Tony is waiting for her, tall and gangly at fifteen, still growing into his limbs and his voice, with that devastating smile he inherited from his father.

"Good morning, Agent Carter," he says, polite and sweetly smiling. She smiles back, feeling the exhaustion weighing on her shoulders, allowing Tony to take her coat and carefully pinning on the face she keeps for the office, stern and capable and together. Her seams are torn, she's coming apart into ribbons, but her mouth is set and her eyes are hard, and she can pretend that it's all okay.

Howard sees right through her, of course. As she steps into their shared office, glancing out of the windows patterned with rosettes of frost to the new skyscraper springing up out of the ground, the workers in their luminous vests perched on the scaffolding like birds, he takes her briefcase from her hand and effortlessly enters in the code, clicking it open and removing the slender beige file. She just looks at him, the lines around his eyes and mouth, deepened with the strain of the last two years - the recovery from the plane crash that still isn't quite over, the nightmares and the midnight tears and the sleepless nights; creating SHIELD, building this city in this concrete, finding the people and effecting worldwide surveillance, watching the threats ebb and flow like the tide; losing his wife to the merciless city streets, her life draining away in a hospital bed while he was trapped in gridlock, burying her in the soft ground as summer filled the air with a shimmering haze - and the grey in his hair. His mouth is a hard, stern line when he looks up at her, and she feels like a child staring down a headmaster, about to be scolded. "Peg..."

"I needed it," she says softly, staring down at her fingernails clasped over the edge of the polished desk. "I only took it for one night. Just a few hours. I wanted to pretend, I...you know how much I miss him."

"We all miss him, Peggy," Howard says, and the file spills open, to that sweet face with its strong jaw and crooked nose and bright eyes, blazing with hope and goodness and heroics. "But we can't change what happened. We can't go back and stop him from diving. We can't go back and stop the train. We have to move forward, with SHIELD, or else Fury is going to leave us in the dust. The world needs us, Agent Carter."

She stares at the photographs, infused with colour and light, the smile that still captures her, makes her breath hitch and her cheeks warm.  **CAPTAIN STEVEN ROGERS: 4TH JULY 1973-23RD MARCH 2000.**  They're familiar words, ones carved in a tombstone that heads an empty grave, but she doubts they'll ever stop jolting unpleasantly through her very bones. She'll never stop thinking about the waste it was, about how young he was to dive into the ice like that, about the last words he said to her. They made promises - promises that had to be broken. But she looks up, composed and cool, and nods. "Of course, Agent Stark. Of course the world needs us." And she brushes the file aside, for an assistant to place back where it rightfully goes, and turns to the emails from intelligence agents out in the field. Agent Barton's latest discovery is one that should be followed.

* * *

In the years that follow, Peggy learns to think of the people of SHIELD as a family. Her and Howard slide into the background, and Fury takes over, running the place with an iron fist and razor-sharp intelligence. His deputy, Agent Hill, is clever and ruthless and fiercely protective of her fellow agents. She takes a bullet for Fury, and bears the twisting scar across her shoulder with pride blazing in her eyes. There are key players in the game, the ones she knows best, who draw together to protect the world: Tony Stark, Howard's son and owner of an even greater genius, that red and gold suit hiding the fact that he's just a child, barely out of school. Bruce Banner, a scientific genius that Tony takes to immediately, hiding an simmering anger behind a gentle smile and round glasses. Sam Wilson, ex-military, warm and funny and incredibly agile in the air. Clint Barton, a trained assassin particularly handy with a bow and arrow, his hearing aid gleaming silver and his eyes like those of an eagle, missing nothing. Natasha Romanoff, once an enemy but apparently on their side now, never seen far from Barton's side, clever and utterly ruthless. Iron Man. The Hulk. Falcon. Hawkeye. Black Widow.

It's not something anyone else would consider a family, but to her they are. She's unmarried, childless, her own family is estranged or buried beneath the earth - SHIELD is all she has, what she's poured every part of herself into. Footsteps on the floors are like the beat of her heart, and she comes to know the sounds of the familiar voices like she knows her own name.

Sirens are wailing outside, screaming filling the air, and her hands are shaking as she loads her gun, hidden in the shadows with Romanoff, the chill of the air biting at exposed flesh and the shuffling footsteps instilling her with cold dread. A long groan stretches out, too close, and before she can even react Romanoff is twisting, aiming, and the dull sound of tearing flesh indicates that she hit her target. She never misses.

They fight, pulled together in a circle, guns poised, breathing shallow and hearts pounding. Breaking formation is dangerous, it would lead to certain death, the undead closing in around them. "First aliens, now this," Barton remarks, and Romanoff laughs as she puts a bullet in the head of an advancing rotter. It's all too much for Peggy, the war is here again, but this time it's against an enemy already dead, that should've been lost to the wind and rain a long time ago, and she can only look and fire, aim steady even though her hands are shaking, watching these terrible creatures writhe and fall. But more keep coming, waves tipped with white claws, and they can do nothing but continue to fight, throwing grenades and spraying bullets out like water. Barton's arrows fly, finding their mark strong and true, but it's not enough.

The scream that erupts when Howard goes down is unholy, echoing around like an eagle's screech. The way Romanoff and Barton fall together is effortless, born of years together on the battlefield, the two of them sliding together like some beast of legend, protecting them as Peggy falls next to him, knees scraping the ground torn up by the battle. "Call in a medical," she snaps, and the next thing she hears is Wilson's voice over the gunfire.

"Stark's down. We need an EMT, right now." He nods at her, and she turns her tear-glazed gaze to Howard, shivering on the ground, bleeding out. He simply stares up at her, eyes misting over, and she prays that Tony will stay in the air. No one needs to see their own father die. Tony will be just another orphan, shaped by the war. Like...like someone lost to the winter.

"Peg." The word is barely more than a breath, but she listens, blood staining her fingers. He'll bleed out, she knows that, they can't save him. So she listens, as Howard Stark draws in a rattling breath and says, "There's a box in my apartment. In the safe. Been there since...since Steve. It was his. Everything I didn't want the museums to have. Take it, Peg. Keep it safe." He looks at her, with eyes thirty years younger, the corners of his mouth twitching in that familiar smirk of lost days in the sun. "Look after Tony. Don't let this screw him up."

Tony lands ten minutes later, in the centre of destruction. Bodies lie everywhere, the terrible creatures still bleeding black. His howl of despair is unlike anything Peggy has ever heard, turning the hairs on the back of her neck to steel, jolting right through her. Natasha turns away, beneath Clint's arm. Bruce shrinks to size, no longer that green monster, and goes to Tony. Fury and Hill walk away, already developing a plan for damage control. Wilson waves away the medical team, telling them there's nothing left to do.

She walks away, sprayed with blood, scarlet dripping from the tips of her fingers. Her feet carry her, legs solid as ancient trees growing in the forest even though her breath is shaky and her hands wracked with tremors, to a familiar door. The apartment is still saturated with the family that once lived there - wedding photos on the mantel, portraits of the treasured child at various ages, the smell of perfume and cologne familiar to her. She goes to the safe, hidden behind the bookshelves in the study Tony shaped his life in. Carefully enters the code, the date engraved on their hearts.

It's an unassuming cardboard box, taped carefully closed. She tugs the knife out from her boot, the leather ties coming loose from her ankle, and feels some kind of visceral satisfaction when she splits the flaps open, finding what's inside warm from years in the safe - a warmth she can imagine is gentle hands handling these sketches. At first, it isn't clear why Howard kept this for all these years, hiding it away from people who would pay the world to have these sketches.

But then she reads the letters, and it all becomes rapidly obvious.

_You were delirious, burning up like you were being dragged through the gates of Hell. I'll follow you there. I'd follow you anywhere._

_Maybe you don't remember that night. I wish you did. The star-peppered sky, the thick smoke in the bar, the whistle of the wind in the empty streets. The way you touched me._

_I'm with you to the end of the line. You know that. These girls, they're just...just a distraction. I want to deny this. But I can't._

_I'll always choose you first. Always._

_I'm yours._

_If loving you is wrong, then I don't want to be right._

Tears slip down her smoke-stained cheeks, leaving pale scars behind on her grey skin. She shakes as she looks through these letters, the sum total of a life together. When he kissed her, she believed. And of course he loved her, she knows he did. If things were different...it would've been them against the world. But she could never compete with this. Doesn't want to. Not this, this thing so much more than love. Predetermined. Destined. Unbreakable.

_Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky. Bucky._

She drops the paper as if it's scalded her, burning her to ashes. The tears are hot in her eyes, painful and prickling, as she forces the ghost back into its cage, and locks it up tight. The country - the world - needs her.

It goes into the SHIELD safe, with everything else they want to keep underground.

* * *

  **Timeline for those who were confused: Steve dies in 2000. Peggy and Howard talk about grief in 2002. Howard's death is in 2008.**


End file.
